The journey of one young woman learning to run a creative business with a DIY attitude.

Monthly Archives: January 2012

Last week I discovered a new blog, The Play Date Cafe. Each week The Cafe releases a new challenge and a new advantage to try on a brand new color scheme in your work. This week’s submission is another handmade card, embroidered for my future mother-in-law’s birthday. Check it out.

For this challenge I decided to combine my two biggest obsessions right now – cardmaking and embroidery – and the results were nothing short of my best card yet. In the image above, the card is pictured with two gifts, an iced-tea maker(behind the card) and a bottle of Wind Song, both cleverly wrapped by yours truly.

My favorite part of this project was stitching in the little french knot flowers. This was my very first learning experience with french knots!

The trickiest part was definitely stitching the design onto the leaves of the tree. To make this easier to work with, I had a lamp pointed directly at my face for a couple of hours.

The color palette that this week’s Play Date Cafe Challenge colors were based on was slate, moss, bark, and burlap. How’d I fair this time, internet?

Crafting has been slow since Christmas. I’ve tinkered with some ideas for cards over the past few weeks, but I haven’t really been able to put my mind to it for quite some time. While looking for some inspiration online, I stumbled upon The Play Date Cafe. Although I was up for a challenge, I wasn’t pleased with the color choices for my first week’s submission, fearing I hadn’t all the right supplies. This is the part in which I show you their color scheme.

Despite my initial troubles, I’m glad now that I took the plunge. I’ve got a pretty sweet valentine made up for my pretty sweet valentine. Here’s my very first submission to The Play Date Cafe Challenge #114! Front…

…and back.

Warning: do not use this card design for your sweetheart if he/she has been known to replace meaningful thank-yous with Matrix jokes. Unless, of course, that’s your thing. Thanks for reading, internet.

In late December, my boyfriend’s brother, Ray, has a birthday. For a few days prior to Christmas, he celebrates Ray Day. During this year’s Ray Day celebration, Brad and I found ourselves at the house of his brother and his fiancee, Lee. We talked and joked and discussed our plans for Christmas 2011. The subject of Christmas eventually turned to talk of Christmas cards.

By this time I had spent nearly the entire month making cards by hand. Unaware of this fact, Ray spoke of how quickly all the cards he received this year would be thrown away. A week into the new year, there is a single card still on display atop Ray and Lee’s Beermeister.

It’s now time to introduce you all to my very first attempt at card-making. I believe a drum-roll is in order…

The first card is an ode to my jerky older brother, Keith.

This was my first hand-stitched card. I found an awesome tutorial for doing this at Freckled Nest!

This year is the year I need to get my business started! I’ve been doing a lot of reading about where to begin, and on marketing and branding and blogging and small-business-starting and whatnot, but haven’t posted anything yet regarding my progress. This is because I simply haven’t made any.

So this year I resolve to cut out the crap and do what’s important:

• This year I will make an item every week to be listed on my Etsy shop, Shubette.

Starting today, I will dedicate each and every week of the year to making something worthwhile.
At week’s end, I will list the new item in my shop.

This exercise will force me to meet my own creative deadlines, find organizational balance while striving to meet my goals, learn the basics of selling online, and it will also help me to learn just what my own niche in the crafting biz is, since I’m fickle and can’t decide where I want to take things just yet.

So what’s your New Year’s resolution? Are you trying to take what you make a little further? If you’re a handmade business owner, what resolutions did you make for yourself and your business when you were starting out? Feel free to let me know by leaving a comment below.